Adventure

The Whale and the Horror

Herman Melville based Moby-Dick on an unprecedented and terrifying event: the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex by an enraged sperm whale. In an excerpt from his new book, a leading Nantucket historian draws on recently discovered material to reconstruct the crew’s epic struggle for survival–an ordeal that took them to the brink of madness.

On 1841, a 22-year-old sailor named Herman Melville became fascinated with an astounding bit of sea lore. Two decades before, 2,700 miles off the western coast of South America, a rogue sperm whale, apparently unprovoked, had rammed a Nantucket vessel, theEssex, sinking it and setting its 20-man crew adrift in the Pacific. In its day, word of the ill-fated voyage created a kind of tidal wave of horror, passing from ship to ship and shore to shore. The tale so haunted whaling circles that Melville, already familiar with the story, was intrigued when a shipmate, on a long ocean journey, pulled a book from his sea chest. It was a chronicle of the disaster written by the sailor’s father, Owen Chase, the first mate on theEssex. “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea,” Melville later wrote, “had a surprising effect upon me.” Chase’s memoir would go on to serve as the basis for the climax of Melville’s classic 1851 novel, Moby-Dick.

But the point at which Melville’s novel ends—the sinking of the ship—was merely the starting point for the story of the real-lifeEssex. That blow seemed to mark the beginning of a kind of terrible laboratory experiment devised to see just how far the human animal could go in its battle against the sea.

In the 180 years since, the saga has evolved from history to fiction to myth. Now comes Nathaniel Philbrick, a leading historian of Nantucket. Philbrick has spent two years sifting through newly discovered crew lists, logs, and other documents to create the definitive modern-day account of theEssexordeal. While Philbrick, like Melville before him, has relied on Chase’s testimony, foremost among Philbrick’s new sources is a long-lost manuscript by theEssexcabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, a teenager when the ship set sail. Nickerson’s notebook, written in 1876, was stowed in an attic for 84 years; portions of it are now revealed in detail for the first time. Excerpted here are some of the most dramatic passages from Philbrick’s new narrative, depicting the savage turns and fateful choices that beset Chase, Nickerson, and their fellow crew members.*

The End

Like a giant bird of prey, the whaleship moved lazily up the western coast of South America, zigging and zagging across a living sea of oil. For that was the Pacific Ocean in 1821, a vast field of warm-blooded oil deposits known as sperm whales.

Harvesting sperm whales was no easy matter. Six men would set out from their ship in a small boat, row up to their quarry, and harpoon it, before attempting to stab it to death with a lance. Then came the prodigious task of transforming a dead whale into oil: ripping off its blubber, chopping it up, and boiling it into the high-grade oil that lit the streets and lubricated the machines of the Industrial Age.

For more than a century, the headquarters of this global oil business had been a little island some 24 miles off the coast of southern New England called Nantucket. One of the defining paradoxes of Nantucket’s whalemen was that many of them were Quakers, a religious sect stoically dedicated to pacifism. At a time when most seamen were notoriously dissolute, the Quaker whalemen of Nantucket viewed their brutal calling as a pathway to both spiritual and financial fulfillment. Combining rigid self-control with an almost holy sense of mission, these were what Herman Melville would call “Quakers with a vengeance.”

It was a Nantucket whaleship, the Dauphin, that was making her way up the Chilean coast. Three years before, New England whalemen had discovered a promising whaling ground in these waters, a thousand miles offshore; its riches had been beckoning a succession of whaleships ever since. And on a February morning in 1821, the lookout saw something unusual—a boat, impossibly small for the open sea, bobbing on the swells. The ship’s captain, Zimri Coffin, trained his spyglass on the mysterious craft.

He soon realized that it was a whaleboat, but a whaleboat unlike any he had ever seen. Its sides had been built up by about half a foot. Two makeshift masts had been rigged, transforming the rowing vessel into a rudimentary schooner. The sails—stiff with salt and bleached by the sun—had evidently pulled the boat along for many, many miles. Coffin could see no one at the steering oar. He turned to the man at the Dauphin’s wheel and ordered, “Hard up the helm.” Under Coffin’s watchful eye, the helmsman brought the ship as close as possible to the derelict craft. The open boat presented a sight that would stay with the crew the rest of their lives.

First they saw bones littering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat had been the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered with sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates.

Instead of greeting their rescuers with relief, the survivors—too delirious with thirst and hunger to speak—were disturbed, even frightened. They jealously clutched the splintered and gnawed-over bones with a desperate, almost feral intensity, refusing to give them up, like two starving dogs found trapped in a pit.

Later, one of them found the strength to tell his story. It was a tale made of a whaleman’s worst nightmares: of being in a boat far from land with nothing left to eat or drink, and—perhaps worst of all—of a whale with the vindictiveness and guile of a man.

The Attack

Tensions were mounting among the officers of the Essex, particularly between Captain George Pollard Jr. and his first mate, Owen Chase. Their mission was clear: to fill their hold with whale oil and return to their home port of Nantucket, a trip of more than 9,000 miles, by way of Cape Horn. Yet for days now, despite dispatching their fleet of three small whaleboats (commanded, in turn, by Pollard, Chase, and second mate Matthew Joy), the crew had come up empty. “Nothing occurred worthy of note during this passage,” the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, remembered in his journal, “with the exception of occasionally chasing a wild shoal of whales to no purpose.”

The situation prompted Chase to make an adjustment aboard his whaleboat. When he and his boat crew did finally approach a whale, it was Chase, not his boatsteerer, Benjamin Lawrence, who held the harpoon. This was a radical and, for Lawrence, humiliating turn of events. A mate took over the harpoon only after he had lost all confidence in his boatsteerer’s ability to fasten to a whale. With Chase at the bow and Lawrence relegated to the steering oar, the first mate’s boat approached a patch of water where, Chase predicted, a whale would surface. Chase was, in his own words, “standing in the fore part, with the harpoon in my hand, well braced.” Unfortunately, a whale surfaced directly under their 25-foot boat, hurling Chase and his crew into the air; the men found themselves clinging to a wrecked whaleboat.

Four days later, on November 20, 1820—after Chase had repaired his damaged boat—the Essex lookout saw spouts. It was about eight in the morning of a bright, clear day. Only a slight breeze was blowing. It was a perfect day for killing whales.

Once the crew had sailed to within a half-mile of the shoal of whales, the Essex headed into the wind with the main-topsail aback, and the three boats were lowered. The whales, unaware that they were being pursued, sounded. Chase directed his men to row to a specific spot, where they waited “in anxious expectation,” scanning the water for the dark shape of a surfacing sperm whale. Once again, Chase took hold of the harpoon, and, sure enough, a small whale emerged. The first mate readied himself to hurl the harpoon, and again he ran into trouble.

Chase had ordered Lawrence to steer the boat in close to the whale. Lawrence did so, so close that as soon as the harpoon sliced into it the panicked animal whacked the already battered craft with its tail, opening up a hole in the boat’s side. As water poured in, Chase cut the harpoon line with a hatchet and ordered the men to stuff their coats and shirts into the jagged opening. While one man bailed, the others rowed back to the ship, where they pulled the boat up onto the Essex’s deck.

By this time, both Pollard’s and Joy’s crews had fastened to whales. Angered that he had been knocked out of the hunt again, Chase began working on his damaged boat with a fury, hoping to get the craft operable while whales were still to be taken. The Essex carried a spare whaleboat lashed to the rack over the quarterdeck, but Chase felt it would be faster to repair his own temporarily by stretching some canvas across the hole. As he nailed the edges of the canvas to the boat, Nickerson took over the helm of the Essex and steered toward Pollard and Joy, whose whales had dragged them several miles to leeward. It was then that Nickerson—all of 15 years old—saw something off the port bow.

It was a whale—a huge sperm whale, the largest they’d seen so far—a male about 85 feet long, they estimated, which would have made it approximately 80 tons. It was less than a hundred yards away, so near that they could see that its giant blunt head was etched with scars, and that it was pointed toward the ship. But this whale wasn’t just large. It was acting in a strange manner. Instead of fleeing, it was floating quietly on the surface of the water, puffing occasionally through its blowhole, as if it were watching them. After spouting two or three times, the whale dived, then surfaced less than 35 yards from the ship.

“His appearance and attitude gave us at first no alarm,” Chase wrote. But suddenly the whale began to move again. Its 12-foot-wide tail pumped up and down. Advancing slowly, with a slight side-to-side waggle, it picked up speed until the water crested around its massive, barrel-shaped head. It was aimed at the Essex’s port side. In an instant, the whale was only a few yards away—“coming down for us,” Chase remembered, “with great celerity.”

In desperate hopes of avoiding a direct hit, Chase shouted to Nickerson, “Put the helm hard up” Several crew members cried out warnings. “Scarcely had the sound of the voices reached my ears,” Nickerson recalled, “when it was followed by a tremendous crash.” The whale rammed the ship just forward of the fore-chains.

The Essex shook as if she had struck a rock. Every man was knocked off his feet. Galápagos tortoises went skittering across the deck. “We looked at each other with perfect amazement,” Chase recalled, “deprived almost of the power of speech.”

As they pulled themselves up off the deck, Chase and his men had good reason to be amazed. Never before, in the history of the Nantucket whale fishery, had a whale been known to attack a ship. In 1807 the whaleship Union had accidentally plowed into a sperm whale at night and sank, but something very different was happening here.

After the impact, the whale passed underneath the ship, bumping the bottom so hard that it knocked off the false keel, a large spine of structural timber running the length of the Essex. The whale surfaced along the starboard side, and the creature, Chase remembered, appeared “stunned with the violence of the blow.”

Instinctively, Chase grabbed a lance. All it would take was one perfectly aimed throw and the first mate might slay the whale that had dared to attack a ship. Chase motioned to stab the bull. Then he hesitated. The whale’s flukes, he noticed, were perilously close to the rudder. If provoked, the whale might smash the delicate steering device with its tail. They were too far from land, Chase decided, to risk it. For the first mate, it was a highly uncharacteristic display of caution. “But could [Chase] have foreseen all that so soon followed,” Nickerson wrote, “he would probably have chosen the lesser evil and have saved the ship by killing the whale even at the expense of losing the rudder.”

Dazed only momentarily, the whale veered off to leeward, swimming approximately 600 yards away. There it began snapping its jaws and thrashing the water with its tail, “as if distracted,” Chase wrote, “with rage and fury.” The whale then swam to windward, crossing the Essex’s bow at high speed. Several hundred yards ahead of the ship, the whale stopped and turned toward the Essex. Fearful that the ship might be taking on water, Chase ordered the men to rig the pumps. “While my attention was thus engaged,” the first mate remembered, “I was aroused with the cry of a man at the hatchway, ‘Here he is—he is making for us again.’” Chase turned and saw a vision of “fury and vengeance” that would become an obsession over the long days ahead.

With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a wake more than 40 feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice the speed of its first encounter—at least six knots. “Hard up” Chase cried out to Nickerson, hoping “to cross the line of his approach before he could get up to us, and thus avoid … our inevitable destruction.” But it was too late for a change of course. With a tremendous splintering of oak, the whale struck the ship just beneath the anchor. The ship lurched to a halt on the slablike forehead of the whale. The creature’s tail continued to work up and down, pushing the 238-ton ship backward until water surged up over the transom.

One of the men who had been belowdecks ran up shouting, “The ship is filling with water” No longer going backward, the Essex was now going down, bow first. The whale, having humbled its strange adversary, disengaged itself from the shattered hull and swam off to leeward, never to be seen again.

Within the span of 10 minutes, no more, the whale had attacked, Chase’s men had scrambled into the spare whaleboat, and the Essex, with an appalling slosh and groan, had capsized behind them.

Two miles away, in Captain Pollard’s whaleboat, boatsteerer Obed Hendricks casually glanced over his shoulder. The Essex, it seemed, had been hit by a sudden squall, its sails flying in all directions as the ship fell onto her beam-ends.

“Look, look,” he cried, “what ails the ship? She is upsetting”

But when the men turned, there was nothing to see. “A general cry of horror and despair burst from the lips of every man,” Chase wrote, “as their looks were directed for [the ship], in vain, over every part of the ocean.” The Essex had vanished below the horizon.

The two boat crews immediately released their whales and began rowing toward the place the Essex should have been. It never occurred to any of them that, in Nickerson’s words, “a whale [had] done the work.” Soon enough, they could see the ship, “floating upon her side and presenting the appearance of a rock.”

As Pollard and Joy approached, the eight men in Chase’s boat continued to stare silently at the ship. “Every countenance was marked with the paleness of despair,” Chase recalled. “Not a word was spoken for several minutes by any of us; all appeared to be bound in a spell of stupid consternation.”

It was not yet 10 in the morning. By then, Chase fully appreciated the service that the steward, William Bond, had rendered. He had salvaged two compasses, two copies of Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator, and two quadrants. Chase later called this equipment “the probable instruments of our salvation.” For his part, Nickerson was swept by a sense of grief. Not for himself, but for the giant black craft. “Here lay our beautiful ship, a floating and dismal wreck,” Nickerson lamented, “which but a few minutes before appeared in all her glory, the pride and boast of her captain and officers, and almost idolized by her crew.”

Soon the other two whaleboats came within hailing distance. But no one said a word. Pollard’s men stopped rowing about 30 feet away. Pollard stood at the steering oar, staring at the capsized hulk that had once been his formidable command, unable to speak. He dropped down onto the seat, so overcome with astonishment, dread, and confusion that Chase “could scarcely recognize his countenance.” Finally Pollard asked, “My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?”

Chase’s reply: “We have been stove by a whale.”

Pollard attempted to restore order and control in this dire situation. As noon approached, he shoved off in his whaleboat to take an observation with his quadrant. They were in the heart of the Pacific Ocean—near the equator, west of South America, at 0 degrees 40 minutes south latitude, 119 degrees 0 minutes west longitude—about as far from land as it was possible to be, give or take a few hundred miles.

Following Pollard’s orders, the crew made careful forays onto the ship, now partially submerged and kept afloat by the oil in its hold. They retrieved two large casks of bread and 600 pounds of hardtack. Although most of the provisions were unreachable in the lower hold, the crew broke through the planks with hatchets to find casks of freshwater. They also scavenged two pounds of boat nails, a musket, and two pistols.

In need of shelter from the mounting wind and waves, yet fearful the Essex might break up at any moment and sink like a stone, Pollard ordered that they tie up their three whaleboats to the ship, leaving at least 100 yards of line between it and themselves. Like a string of ducklings trailing their mother, they spent the night in the lee of the Essex.

For much of that first night, the ship shuddered with each wave. Chase lay sleepless in his boat, staring at the wreck and reliving the catastrophe over and over in his mind. Once, he admitted, he found himself breaking into tears. Part of him, no doubt, was guilt-racked, knowing that if he had only hurled the lance it might have all turned out differently. (When it came time to write his account, Chase would neglect to mention that he had had the chance to lance the whale—an omission Nickerson made sure to correct in his narrative.) But the more Chase thought about it, the more he realized that no one could have expected a whale to attack a ship not just once, but twice. “He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered,” the first mate wrote, “and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”

It is believed that sperm whales may use clicking signals to communicate over distances of up to five miles. And their steady clicks, at roughly half-second intervals, have been known to bear such a similarity to the tapping of a hammer that 19th-century whalemen dubbed the sperm whale “the carpenter fish.” On the morning of November 20, by busily nailing a piece of canvas to the bottom of his upturned whaleboat, Owen Chase had been transmitting sounds, unwittingly, down through the wooden skin of the whaleship and out into the ocean—signals that may have led the whale to perceive the Essex as another whale, specifically another male, invading his territory.

In fact, Chase was convinced that the Essex and her crew had been deliberately attacked. Both times the whale had approached from a direction “calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock.” And yet, the whale had avoided striking the ship head-on, where the ship’s heavily reinforced stem, the vertical timber at the leading edge of the bow, might have delivered a mortal gash.

Chase began to wonder what “unaccountable destiny or design” had been at work. It almost seemed as if something—could it have been God?—had possessed the beast for its own strange, unfathomable purpose. Whatever or whoever might be behind it, Chase was convinced that “anything but chance” had sunk the Essex.

As they bobbed in the lee of the wreck, however, his shipmates were of no mind to debate the whale’s motives. Their overwhelming concern was how 20 men in three boats could get out of a plight like this alive.

The Plan

After two days, the ship’s deck had broken almost entirely away from the hull. Like a whale dying in a slow-motion flurry, the Essex in dissolution made for a disturbing sight, her joints and seams working violently in the waves. She was bleeding from the burst casks within her hull, surrounding the men in a reeking slick of whale oil—a yellowish slime that coated the boats’ sides and slopped over the gunwales with the waves. Their three boats became slippery and quite dangerous to move around in. The fluid that only a few days before had been their fortune was now their torment.

Chase decided that something must be done. He rowed over to Pollard and declared that it was time for them to sail “towards the nearest land.” The captain stalled, insisting that they scavenge the wreck one last time for provisions. Then, after conducting yet another navigational observation, Pollard joined his two mates in his whaleboat, spreading out before them their two navigation books containing lists of the latitudes and longitudes of “Friendly and other Islands in the Pacific Ocean.”

Since their sail-equipped whaleboats could travel only with the wind, their options were limited. Backtracking to the Galápagos, and beyond that to South America, a trip of more than 2,000 miles, meant bucking both the southeasterly trade winds and a strong west-flowing current. Pollard deemed it impossible. The closest islands to the west, on the other hand, were the Marquesas, an atoll 1,500 miles away and roughly 2,200 miles south of Hawaii. Unfortunately, the Essex men had heard that their inhabitants had a reputation for cannibalism. “In times of famine,” wrote one Western visitor of the period, “the men butcher their wives, and children, and aged parents.” Georg von Langsdorff, whose ship touched at the Marquesas in 1804, claimed that the islanders found human flesh so delicious “that those who have once eaten it can with difficulty abstain from it.” All agreed that the Marquesas must be avoided. (In fact, traders of the day had visited these islands without incident. While tales of cannibalism persisted, there was plenty
of readily accessible information to the contrary.)

Several hundred miles to the south of the Marquesas were the Society Islands. Although he had no trustworthy information to go on, Pollard was under the impression that they were a safer option. With a little luck, this target might be reached in less than 30 days.

Chase and Joy disagreed with Pollard. They pointed out that, except for vague rumors, they were “entirely ignorant” of the Society Islands. For all they knew, the natives there too practiced cannibalism. Instead, Chase and Joy proposed that if they sailed south for about 1,500 miles they would enter a band of variable breezes that they could then ride to Chile or Peru. They figured their boats could cover a degree of latitude—60 nautical miles—a day. That would put them in the variables in 26 days; 30 days later, they would be on the coast of South America. With enough bread and water to last about 60 days, it all seemed—at least to Chase and Joy—very feasible. And besides, somewhere along the way they might be spotted by another whaleship. The two mates lightly described their proposal as “going up the coast.”

Just as he had during an earlier stretch of the voyage, Pollard succumbed to them. Instead of insisting that his officers carry out his proposal—reasonable behavior for an experienced sea captain in the early stages of a disaster—he embraced a more democratic style of command. “Not wishing to oppose where there was two against one,” Nickerson remembered, “the captain reluctantly yielded to their arguments.” When writing of this “fatal error” later, the Essex’s cabin boy asked, “How many warm hearts have ceased to beat in consequence of it?”

For better or worse, the men of the Essex were sailing toward a destiny that would be determined, in large part, not by their indecisive captain but by their forceful first mate.

The crew—nine Nantucketers, five white mainlanders, and six African-Americans —split up among the three whaleboats. Feeling personally responsible for the young Nantucketers aboard the Essex, Pollard made sure that his boat contained his 18-year-old cousin, Owen Coffin, and Coffin’s two boyhood friends, Charles Ramsdell and Barzillai Ray. Nickerson’s position as Chase’s after oarsman meant that he was not included in this group but must manage as best he could on Chase’s boat, the leakiest of the three.

All 20 men were nominally under the command of Captain Pollard, but each boat crew remained an autonomous entity that might at any moment become separated from the others. Each boat was given 200 pounds of hardtack, 65 gallons of water, and two Galápagos tortoises. To ensure that discipline would be maintained, Pollard gave each mate a pistol, keeping a musket for himself.

At 12:30—less than a half-hour after the officers had convened their council—they set out in a strong breeze, their schooner-rigged whaleboats, according to Nickerson, “a very handsome show on this our first start.” The men’s spirits were the lowest they’d ever been. With the Essex receding rapidly behind them, they were beginning to appreciate what Nickerson called “the slender thread upon which our lives were hung.”

All were affected by leaving their ship. The men exchanged frightened glances, even as they continued to search out the disappearing wreck, “as though,” Nickerson said, “it were possible that she could relieve us from the fate that seemed to await us.” With no turning back, they had only one recourse, to hold to their plan.

The plan had one iron requirement: each crew had to make its provisions last two months. Each man would get an average of half a pint of water and six ounces of hardtack a day. Hardtack was a simple dried bread made out of flour and water, baked into a moisture-free rock to prevent spoilage. The daily ration, equivalent to six slices of bread, provided about 500 calories. Despite the occasional helping of tortoise meat, they would have to subsist on what amounted to a starvation diet. If they did succeed in reaching South America in 60 days, each man knew he would be little more than a breathing skeleton. But as they would soon discover, their greatest concern was not food, but water. The human body, which is roughly 70 percent water, requires a bare minimum of a pint a day to remove its waste products. The men of the Essex would have to make do with half that amount.

By four that first afternoon, they had lost sight of the Essex. Almost immediately, the men’s morale began to improve. Nickerson sensed that, no longer shadowed by the disabled ship, they had been “relieved from a spell by which we had been bound.” He went so far as to claim that “now that our minds were made up for the worst, half the struggle was over.”

At Sea

Unable to sleep for the third night in a row, Chase continued to dwell on the creature that had attacked their ship. “The horrid aspect and revenge of the whale,” he wrote, “wholly engrossed my reflections.”

For most disaster victims, such flashbacks have a therapeutic value, gradually separating the sufferer from anxieties that might otherwise interfere with his ability to survive. There are some, however, who cannot rid themselves of the memory. Melville, building upon Chase’s account, would make his Captain Ahab a man who never emerged from the psychic depths in which Chase writhed. Just as Chase was convinced that the whale which attacked the Essex exhibited “decided, calculating mischief,” so was Ahab haunted by a sense of the white whale’s “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.”

Within six days of abandoning the Essex, the men in Chase’s boat began to experience overpowering thirst—a lust for water that made it impossible to think about anything else. Despite the dryness of their mouths, they talked compulsively about their cravings. Only gradually did they realize the cause of their distress.

The day before, they had started eating bread that had been drenched by a large wave. The bread, which they had carefully dried in the sun, now contained all the salt of seawater—but without the water. Already severely dehydrated, the men were, in effect, pouring gasoline on the fire of their thirsts—forcing their kidneys to extract additional fluid from their bodies to excrete the salt. “The privation of water is justly ranked among the most dreadful of the miseries of our life,” Chase recorded. “The violence of raving thirst has no parallel in the catalogue of human calamities.”

Soon, the men’s hunger became almost as difficult to bear. The weather proved the best they’d seen since leaving the Essex eight days before, and Chase proposed that they attempt to allay “the ravenous gnawings upon our stomachs” by eating one of the tortoises. All readily agreed. First they flipped the tortoise on its back. As his men held its beak and claws, Chase slit the creature’s throat, cutting the arteries and veins on either side of the vertebrae in the neck. Nickerson claimed that “all seemed quite impatient of the opportunity to drink the blood as it came oozing from the wound.” They collected the blood in the same tin cup from which they drank their water rations. Chase then inserted his knife into the leathery skin beside the neck and worked his way around the shell’s edge, cutting until he could lift out the meat and guts. With the help of a tinderbox, they kindled a fire in the shell and cooked the tortoise, “entrails and all.”

After 10 days of eating only bread, the men greedily attacked the tortoise, their teeth ripping the succulent flesh as warm juice ran down their faces. Their bodies’ instinctive need for nutrition drew them irresistibly to the tortoise’s vitamin-rich heart and liver. Chase dubbed it “an unspeakably fine repast.”

For the next three days, the weather remained mild and clear. Their stomachs full, the sailors dared to believe that “our situation was not at that moment … so comfortless as we had been led at first to consider.” Nickerson noticed “a degree of repose and carelessness, scarcely to be looked for amid persons in our forlorn and hopeless situation.”

That Sunday evening, after the men in Chase’s boat had conducted what Nickerson called “our usual prayer meeting,” clouds moved in, cutting them off from the starlight and making the night black. At around 10, Chase and Pollard lost track of Joy’s boat. Its disappearance was so sudden that Nickerson feared “something had destroyed them,” but the three boats were soon reunited. Two nights later, a similar incident occurred, prompting the officers to agree that if they should ever become separated again, no action would be taken. Too much time was being lost trying to reassemble the convoy.

Besides, if a boat either capsized or became unrepairable, there was little the other crews could do. All three boats were already overloaded, and to add more men to any one of them might result in the eventual death of its occupants. The notion of beating away the helpless crew of another boat with one’s oars was too awful to contemplate.

On December 8, the 17th day, the wind increased to a full gale. Forty- to 50-knot gusts lashed the men with rain. The boats became unmanageable in the immense waves. “The sea rose to a fearful height,” Chase remembered, “and every wave that came looked as if it must be the last.” There was nothing for the men to do but lie down in the bottom of their fragile vessels and “await the approaching issue with firmness and resignation.”

Gale-force winds in the open ocean can build up waves of 40 feet. But the mountainous size of these waves actually worked to the men’s advantage. The whaleboats flicked over the crests, then wallowed in the troughs, temporarily protected from the wind. The walls of water looming on either side were a terrifying sight, but not once did a wave crash down and swamp a boat.

The intense darkness of the night was, according to Nickerson, “past conception to those who have not witnessed the same.” Making the blackness all the more horrible were flashes of lightning that seemed to envelop the boats in crackling sheets of fire.

None of the men had slept all night. All had expected to die. The next day, when Chase ordered his crew to raise the masts and set sail shortly after the storm had passed, they resisted. “My companions … were dispirited and broken down to such a degree,” the first mate remembered, “as to appear to want some more powerful stimulus than the fears of death to enable them to do their duty.” But Chase was unrelenting. “By great exertions,” he induced them to restep the masts and set a double-reefed mainsail and jib, even though dawn had not yet arrived. All three boats were sailing again when “the sun arose and showed the disconsolate faces of our companions once more.”

Thus far, they had stayed ahead—just barely—of their target of a degree of latitude a day, having traveled close to 1,100 nautical miles. However, due to the easterly direction of the winds, they were now farther from South America than when they’d started. They had close to 5,000 miles left to go if they were to reach their destination. They were starving and thirsty. Their boats were barely holding together. But there was a way out.

On December 9, as they approached the end of their third week, they drew abreast of the Society Islands. If they had headed west, sailing along 17 degrees south latitude, they could have reached Tahiti in a matter of weeks. Also, they would have been sailing with the wind and waves, easing the strain on the boats. And yet, despite the numerous setbacks they had already faced, despite the extremity of their suffering, Pollard, Chase, and Joy pushed on with the original plan. Nickerson could not understand why. “I can only say there was gross ignorance or a great oversight somewhere, which cost many … fine seamen their lives.” The men’s suffering only narrowed and intensified their focus. It was “up the coast” or nothing.

Centering Down

Their thirst and hunger reached a new, agonizing level. Just to make sure that no one was tempted to steal any of
the bread, Chase transferred the provisions to his sea chest. Whenever he slept, he draped an arm or a leg across it. He also kept a loaded pistol at his side. Nickerson’s impression was that “nothing but violence to his person” would have induced the first mate to surrender their food. Chase decided that if anyone should object to his method of rationing, he would “immediately divide our subsistence into equal proportions, and give each man’s share into his own keeping.” If it came down to giving up his own stock, he was “resolved to make the consequences of it fatal.”

That afternoon, a school of flying fish surrounded the three whaleboats. Four of the fish hit the sails of Chase’s boat. One fell at the first mate’s feet, and instinctively he devoured it whole, scales and all. As the rest of the crew scrambled for the other three fish, Chase found himself inclined to laugh (for the first time since the sinking of the Essex) at “the ludicrous and almost desperate efforts of my five companions, who each sought to get a fish.” The first mate might insist on the disciplined sharing of the bread and water, but a different standard prevailed when it came to windfalls such as flying fish. It was every man for himself. (With the exception of this instance, the sailors were unsuccessful in their attempts to catch fish. Part of the problem was that they were headed for an area of the Pacific that was virtually devoid of surface marine life.)

By December 14, the 23rd day since leaving the Essex, they were stuck in a calm, with hundreds of miles still to go. If they were to have any hope of reaching the coast alive, they now realized, their provisions would have to last them considerably longer than 60 days. Chase announced to his men that he was cutting their rations
of hardtack in half, to only three ounces of bread a day. He studied his crew carefully, looking for any signs of resistance. “No objections were made,” Chase reported. “All submitted, or seemed to do so, with an admirable fortitude and forbearance.”

Even though their supply of water was in greater danger of running out, Chase had no alternative but to maintain their daily ration at half a pint. “[Our] thirst had become now incessantly more intolerable than our hunger,” he wrote, “and the quantity then allowed was barely sufficient to keep the mouth in a state of moisture, for about one third of the time.” In desperation, the men also drank their own urine.

As the sun beat down out of an empty blue sky, the heat became so unbearable that three of the men in Chase’s boat decided to hang over the gunwale and cool their blistered bodies in the sea. Almost as soon as the first man dropped over the side, he shouted with excitement. The bottom of their boat was covered with what he described as small clams. He quickly pulled one off and ate it, pronouncing it a “most delicious and agreeable food.” (Instead of clams, these were goose barnacles, a delicacy in many lands.) Soon all six men were plucking crustaceans off the boat’s bottom and popping them into their mouths “like a set of gluttons.”

After several more days beneath the punishing sun, Pollard was moved to address the three boat crews. His voice ravaged by dehydration, he proposed in a halting rasp that they attempt to row their way out of the calm. Each man would be given double rations during the day, and then that night they would row “until we should get a breeze from some quarter or other.”

At last, after days of being stuck as if pinned to a place in the ocean, with nothing to distract them from their thirst or hunger, they had something to prepare for. They ate the bread and felt every drop of water seep into their cracked and shriveled mouths. They looked forward to the night ahead.

Under normal circumstances, rowing was a task that helped define each man’s worth on a whaleboat. Each crew took pride in its ability to row effortlessly, for hours at a time, and nothing made the men happier than passing another boat. But that night any flickering of those competitive fires was soon extinguished. For the last three weeks, their bodies had been consuming themselves. Though in their teens and 20s, they rowed like old men—wincing and groaning with every stroke. Their arms had shrunk to sticks as muscles withered, making it difficult to hold, let alone pull, the oars. As man after man collapsed, it became impossible to continue. Air rattled in their desiccated throats and lungs as they lay panting in the boats. Gradually the noise of their breathing ebbed, and they were once again deafened by the forbidding silence of a windless and empty ocean.

The next night, Chase recalled, proved to be “one of the most distressing nights in the whole catalogue of our sufferings.” It was clear that they no longer had enough water to last the 30 days or more it would take to sail to the coast of Chile. Their physical torments had reached a terrible crescendo. It was almost as if they were being poisoned by the combined effects of thirst and hunger. A glutinous and bitter saliva collected in their mouths that was “intolerable beyond expression.” Their hair was falling out in clumps. Their skin was so burned and covered with sores that a splash of seawater could feel like acid burning their flesh. Strangest of all, as their eyes sunk into their skulls and their cheekbones projected, they all began to look alike, their identities obliterated by dehydration and starvation.

Throughout this long and dismal week, the men had attempted to sustain themselves with a kind of mantra: “‘Patience and long-suffering’ was the constant language of our lips,” Chase remembered, “and a determination, strong as the resolves of the soul could make it, to cling to existence as long as hope and breath remained to us.” But by the night of December 19, almost precisely a month since the sinking of the Essex, several of the men had given up. Chase could see “an utter indifference to their fate” in their “lagging spirits and worn out frames.” One more day, maybe two, and people would start to die.

Necessity

Although the men had the good fortune the very next day to reach dry land, coming ashore at deserted Henderson Island, they abandoned it after a week to continue their voyage. Most believed that the barren outcropping of coral would not have supported life for long. (Three of the men, feeling they stood a better chance on land than in an open boat at sea, chose to remain on the island. They were rescued three and a half months later.)

Then, on January 10, as the 17 survivors sailed on, still more than 2,000 miles from South America, the inevitable happened. Second mate Matthew Joy, who had been suffering from an undiagnosed illness even before the sinking, died before his shipmates’ eyes. Attaching a rock to his feet, the men slipped his body into the ocean.

To make matters worse, two nights after Joy’s death, in the midst of a tremendous gale, Chase and his men were separated from the others. “As soon as daylight appeared,” wrote Nickerson, one of the five men on Chase’s whaleboat, “every man in our boat raised [himself,] searching the waters.” Grabbing the masts, and each other, for support, they stood up on the seats, craning their necks for a glimpse of their companions on the wave-fringed horizon. But they had disappeared. Chase and his men were now alone. “For many days after this accident,” he wrote, “our progress was attended with dull and melancholy reflections. We had lost the cheering of each other’s faces.”

The men in the other two boats were affected just as gravely by the separation. And then, January 14, the crew commanded by Obed Hendricks (who had replaced Joy as leader of the third whaleboat) ran out of food and water. The lives of Hendricks and his five crew members—Joseph West, Lawson Thomas, Charles Shorter, Isaiah Sheppard, and the steward, William Bond—suddenly hinged upon a single question: Would Captain Pollard be willing to share his boat’s provisions?

Having placed Hendricks in command of the second mate’s boat only three days before, Pollard could not easily deny his former boatsteerer some of his own stock of food. And if he was willing to feed Hendricks, he would have to feed the other five. So Pollard and his men shared with them what little bread they had, knowing full well that in only a few more days there would be nothing left.

On January 20, eight days after losing sight of Chase’s boat, Pollard’s and Hendricks’s men were coming to the end of their provisions. That day, Lawson Thomas, one of the black sailors on Hendricks’s boat, died. With at most a pound of hardtack left to share among 10 men, Hendricks and his crew dared speak of a subject that had been on all their minds: whether they should eat, instead of bury, the body.

For as long as men had been sailing the world’s oceans, famished sailors had been sustaining themselves on the remains of dead shipmates. By the early 19th century, cannibalism at sea was so widespread that survivors often felt compelled to inform their rescuers if they had not resorted to it, since, according to one historian, “suspicion of this practice among starving castaways was a routine reaction.” Now, almost two months after spurning the Society Islands because, in Pollard’s words, “we feared we should be devoured by cannibals,” they were about to eat one of their own.

First they had to butcher the body. On a Nantucket whaleship, it was typically the black crew members who prepared and cooked the food. And all of the men had taken part in the cutting up of several dozen sperm whales. But this was not a whale or a tortoise. This was Lawson Thomas, a shipmate with whom they had shared two hellish months in an open boat. Whoever butchered Thomas’s body had to contend not only with the cramped quarters of a 25-foot boat, but also with the chaos of his own emotions.

If Hendricks and his men followed examples of other such incidents of the time, they would have begun by removing the most obvious signs of the corpse’s humanity—the head, hands, feet, and skin—and consigning them to the sea. Next, they would have removed Thomas’s heart, liver, and kidneys from the bloody basket of his ribs. Then they would have begun to hack the meat from the backbone, ribs, and pelvis. In any case, Pollard reported that after lighting a fire on the flat stone at the bottom of the boat they roasted the organs and meat and began to eat.

Instead of easing their hunger pangs, their first taste only intensified their atavistic urge to eat. The saliva flowed in their mouths as their long-dormant stomachs gurgled with digestive juices. And the more they ate, the hungrier they became.

Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the phenomenon of cannibalism have estimated that the average human adult would provide about 66 pounds of edible meat. But Lawson Thomas’s body, that of a starvation victim, may have yielded as little as 30 pounds of lean, fibrous meat. On the following day, when the captain’s store of bread ran out, Pollard and his men “were glad to partake of the wretched fare with the other crew.”

Two days later, on January 23, the 63rd day since leaving the wreck, yet another member of Hendricks’s crew—Charles Shorter—died and was eaten. Next came Isaiah Sheppard’s death, four days after Shorter’s. The following day, Samuel Reed, a sailor on Pollard’s boat, perished as well.

The night of January 29 was darker than most. That evening, Pollard and his men looked up to find that the whaleboat containing Hendricks, Bond, and West had disappeared. That left Pollard and his remaining crew of three alone, 1,500 miles from the Chilean coast, with only the half-eaten corpse of Samuel Reed to sustain them.

But no matter how dire their situation might have seemed, their prospects were better than those of Hendricks’s boat crew. Without a compass or quadrant, Hendricks and his men were now lost in a vacant and limitless sea. (Months later, a whaleboat with four skeletons inside was discovered washed up on the brittle shore of Ducie Island, a desolate speck in the Pacific located 1,350 miles southeast of Tahiti near the notorious Pitcairn Island, refuge of the Bounty mutineers some 40 years before. If this was indeed the second mate’s boat, the skeletons belonged to Hendricks, Bond, West, and perhaps Isaiah Sheppard, the last of the crew to die before their separation from Pollard.)

In the span of a month, then, seven men would be thus consumed by their shipmates aboard the three vessels.

Salvation

Even the fastidious Owen Chase, who had hoarded and parceled out his whaleboat’s provisions for almost three months, was reduced to a grim, primal state. Remarking on his crew’s decision to eat shipmate Isaac Cole, Chase insisted that he had “no language to paint the anguish of our souls in this dreadful dilemma.” Making it all the worse was the thought that one of them might be next. “We knew not then,” the first mate wrote, “to whose lot it would fall next, whether to die or be shot, and eaten like the poor wretch we had just dispatched.”

By week’s end, however, fortune intervened. On February 14, Chase’s boat encountered several days of westerly winds that brought his vessel to within 300 miles of Masafuera, part of the Juan Fernández Islands. (The boat in Pollard’s command was 250 miles to the south; by now, the two craft had been on separate courses for more than a month.) If Chase averaged 60 miles a day, his crew might reach safety in another five days. Unfortunately, they had only three days of hardtack left. The men, in fact, were convinced that after almost three months of suffering they were about to die nearly within sight of salvation.

But the next afternoon, Chase saw a thick cloud to the northeast—a sure sign of land. It must be the island of Masafuera—at least that was what Chase told Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson. In two days, he assured them, they would be on dry land. At first his companions were reluctant to believe him. Gradually, however, after “repeated assurances of the favorable appearance of things” on the part of Chase, “their spirits acquired even a degree of elasticity that was truly astonishing.” The wind remained favorable all night, and with their sails trimmed perfectly and a man tending the steering oar, their little boat made the best time of the voyage.

The next morning the cloud still loomed ahead. The end of their ordeal was apparently only days away. But, for 15-year-old Thomas Nickerson, the strain of anticipation had become too much. After bailing out the boat, he lay down, drew the mildewed piece of canvas over him like a shroud, and told his fellow crew members that “he wished to die immediately.”

“I saw that he had given up,” Chase wrote, “and I attempted to speak a few words of comfort and encouragement to him.” But all the arguments that had served the first mate so well failed to penetrate Nickerson’s inner gloom. “A fixed look of settled and forsaken despondency came over his face,” Chase wrote. “He lay for some time silent, sullen, and sorrowful—and I felt at once … that the coldness of death was fast gathering upon him.”

At seven in the morning, on February 18, Chase was sleeping in the bottom of the boat. Benjamin Lawrence was at the helm. He leaned into the steering oar and scanned the horizon.

“There’s a sail” Lawrence cried.

Chase immediately scrambled to his feet. Just visible over the horizon was the speck of pale brown that Lawrence had taken for a sail. Chase gradually realized that it was the topgallant of a ship about seven miles away. “I do not believe it is possible,” Chase wrote, “to form a just conception of the pure, strong feelings, and the unmingled emotions of joy and gratitude, that took possession of my mind on this occasion.” Soon Nickerson too was up on his feet and gazing excitedly ahead.

Now the question was whether they could catch up to the much larger vessel. The ship was several miles to leeward, which was an advantage for the smaller vessel, and heading slightly north of their position, which meant that it might intercept their line of sail. “I felt at the moment,” Chase wrote, “a violent and unaccountable impulse to fly directly towards her.”

For the next three hours they were in a desperate race, their battered whaleboat skimming over the waves at between four and six knots. There was no lookout at the other craft’s masthead, but eventually someone on deck saw them approaching. Chase and his men watched in tense fascination as the antlike figures bustled about the ship, shortening sail. Gradually the whaleboat closed the distance, the merchantman looming larger, until Chase could read her quarter board. She was the Indian from London.

Chase heard a shout and through glazed and reddened eyes saw a figure at the quarterdeck rail with a trumpet, a hailing device resembling a megaphone. It was an officer of the Indian, asking who they were. Chase summoned all his strength to make himself heard, but his desiccated tongue stumbled over the words: Essex … whaleship … Nantucket.

Three hundred miles to the south, Pollard and Charles Ramsdell sailed on in their feeble whaleboat. For the next five days they pushed east until, by February 23, the 94th day since leaving the wreck, they were approaching the island of Santa María, off Chile. It had been 12 days since the death of crewman Barzillai Ray. They had long since eaten the last scrap of his flesh. The two famished men now cracked open the bones of their shipmates, beating them against the stone on the bottom of the boat and smashing them with the boat’s hatchet, then eating the marrow.

Pollard would later remember these as “days of horror and despair.” Both of them were so weak that they could barely lift their hands. They were drifting in and out of consciousness. It is not uncommon for castaways who have been many days at sea and suffered both physically and emotionally to lapse into what has been called a “collective confabulation,” in which they exist in a shared fantasy world. For Pollard and Ramsdell, it was the bones—gifts from the men they had known and loved—that became their obsession. They stuffed their pockets with finger bones; they sucked the sweet marrow from the splintered ribs and thigh bones. And they sailed on, the compass card wavering toward east.

Suddenly they heard a sound: men shouting and then silence as shadows fell across them and then the rustle of wind in sails and the creaking of spars and rigging. They looked up, and there were faces.

In the months ahead, the story that would make the rounds of the world’s whaling fleet was that the crew of the Dauphin, a Nantucket ship, had come across two castaways, not much more than skeletons, “sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.”

The Dauphin’s captain, Zimri Coffin, ordered his men to lower a boat and bring the two survivors aboard. And that evening, at around five, the Dauphin encountered the whaleship Diana from New York. The Diana’s captain, Aaron Paddack, was invited to join Captain Coffin for dinner—along with Captain Pollard, formerly of the Essex.

Like many survivors, Pollard was animated by a fierce and desperate compulsion to tell his story. Just as the gaunt, wild-eyed Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s poem poured forth each harrowing detail to the Wedding Guest, so did Pollard tell them everything: how his ship had been attacked “in a most deliberate manner” by a large sperm whale, how they had headed south in the whaleboats, and how some of the sailors had then become “food for the remainder.”

Later that night, once he had returned to the Diana, Captain Paddack wrote it all down, calling Pollard’s account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.”

By the summer of 1821, the five Nantucket survivors of the Essex had made it back home. Before long, every one of them would return to the sea.